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Welcome to
Credit Today Online
Credit Today is the premier online portal for trade credit professionals. This web site and all the resources within are for subscribers to Credit Today Online. If you are new to our site, please feel free to browse some of our sample articles now!
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Make Sure Your Credit Staff is Organized to Fit Your Needs
By Dave Schmidt
Once credit departments reach a certain size, typically four to six people, adjusting the mix of staff skill levels and how work is distributed, without making any other changes, can significantly improve performance. Making the wrong moves, on the other hand, can result in diminishing returns. P . . . keep reading
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8 Tips to to Help Jump Start Your Written Communications
Credit staffers who are top performers and who get ahead know how important it is to write memos, reports, etc., that are clear and concise. Here are some ideas for improving your writing skills: 1. Selecting a style. To start, ask yourself, "Who will read this document?" Knowing yo . . . keep reading
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Case Study: A Recession Dividend - Motivation to Improve Credit and Collection Processes from Start to Finish
The harder you've been hit by recession, the stronger your motivation to improve your processes and procedures. And that's a good thing. This company, pounded by the housing construction slump, has restructured everything from appraising customer risk to systematically pursuing delinquents to reporting credit and collection efforts and results to management. When the housing bubble burst, annual housing starts plunged in two years from 1.8 million to 500,000. "With lower sales, we needed to budget more carefully," says Ron Tuturice, director of credit services at Certainteed, which is geared to new housing with a contracting and distribution customer base. "We needed to take stock. Do we need to do things differently than we did before? The answer was 'yes.'" . . . keep reading
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Let Me Help You Get Paid!
There probably never was a time in credit and collections when it was a good idea to just sit back and wait for your money to come in. But, if there was, it's long gone now. You've got to be proactive, and the less sophisticated your customers are about the financial side of their businesses, the more proactive you've got to be. Lake Steel, Ltd. sells to a wide variety of customers, but many are subcontractors working on construction projects under general contractors. "General contractors don't like to hear the word 'lien,'" notes Credit Manager C.B. Sehorn. "Their aim is to create as few problems as possible. They don't want suppliers contacting their bonding companies or the owners of their jobs." . . . keep reading
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Bigger Companies' Payment Performance on the Upswing
While small business continues to struggle, bigger companies are doing better-and paying their suppliers sooner. The CFO 2009 Credit Risk Report shows that mid-caps (publicly traded companies headquartered in the U.S. with annual revenues of $100 million to $1 billion) have recovered sharply since p . . . keep reading
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Credit Managers' Index Is Up Despite Financial Sector Headwinds
On a brighter note, the NACM's Credit Managers' Index (CMI) reached a recent high of 52.3 in November, up from 51 in October and from 42.2 a year ago. The latest reading is a compilation of four "favorable" and six "unfavorable" factors. "Sales" was by far the most improved favorable factor, surg . . . keep reading
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Dismal Outlook for Bank Lending to Small Business
The Administration's jawboning to get banks to increase lending to small business notwithstanding, it's hard to be optimistic that anything will happen soon. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which managed more than 130 bank failures last year, is requesting a 35 percent increase in . . . keep reading
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The Credit Department of the Future
Establishing a credit/customer partnership is usually a drawn-out, halting, evolutionary process. Not here. Close working relationships with key customers' decision makers begin at the time of the first sale. It's a function of the Distribution Services Agreement, a customer relationship framework, now widely used in the pharmaceutical industry and probably a template for many industries in the future. . . . keep reading
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The Importance of Understanding the Differences between a Resale Certificate and a Sales Tax Registration Number
By Richard C. Macias, Esq.
Wholesale distributors/vendors of products face a significant new burden from audits by state tax agencies that are seeking to recover unpaid sales taxes. As state agencies confront their urgent fiscal obligations to collect these taxes, distributors can anticipate state audits focusing on whether their credit files include the proper resale certificates to document the tax exempt status of their sales. A huge potential liability arises if these distributors/vendors have not properly documented the tax exempt nature of their sales to their buyers, usually because they don't have the required resale certificate in their credit file. . . . keep reading
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Managing Credit With Minimal Financial Information
Urgent as it has become to accurately assess customers' financial strength, Credit Manager Jim Cunningham, a 32-year veteran of trade credit, finds that getting the information for making astute decisions has never been more difficult. It's "almost unheard of" that you can get a large bank to give you customer information today, he notes. Smaller banks may still be taking calls and talking, but that, he adds, is more of an old boy network. Bigger banks distribute information amongst themselves but don't distribute it to unsecured creditors, he tells us. And hedge funds and private equity lenders are even worse. It sounds good, he says, when a customer calls and says that they've got some kind of hedge fund backing them. When he hears that, he asks for personal guarantees, but "that's when we see them running," he relates. S elling from some 80 locations, O'Neal is the country's largest family-owned steel service center. Cunningham's region stretches from Atlanta on the East Coast to four districts in Colorado and includes the O'Neal facility in Monterrey, Mexico. . . . keep reading
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20-Day Period For Administrative Claims a Good Thing? Not Really, Says This Leading Bankruptcy Pro
Strapped customers often don't admit they've lost their bank lines of credit. While requesting or demanding more help from you, they may even claim their banking relationships are just fine. How do you check that out? "It's a real challenge," says Attorney Lynnette Warman of the Dallas firm of Hunton & Williams, LLP. "Public companies have to disclose if they're in default or have a waiver with their lender. But, if they're a private company, they don't. With public companies, you can check their SEC filings. If it's a private company you just have to rely on agency reports, your industry trade group and the Internet and other media to try to figure out what their ability is to pay you back." . . . keep reading
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When Is a Lawsuit Too Late?
By Ann Morales Olazabal, MBA, JD
As we have seen in the past few issues, a single dispute between a creditor and a debtor often spawns a number of different legal considerations. This month we look at a different aspect of the ongoing dispute between Southeast Building Supply, the cabinet supplier, and Abbott & Essex, Inc. ("A&E"), . . . keep reading
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Checks Being Phased Out in the UK
Paper bank checks will pass into United Kingdom history if that country's Payments Council approves a proposal to stop clearing checks at its meeting this month. High costs (four times as much as electronic payments) and declining usage (a 66 percent drop in the past 20 years) may have persuaded the . . . keep reading
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Knowing Your Rights
When the oil and gas industry was hot a year and a half ago, new suppliers flocked into the oil patch. Concrete suppliers and equipment distributors, who had never done business there before, were pouring drilling platforms and selling compressors. And when the market collapsed, they feared they wer . . . keep reading
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Customers Are Mad at Me
I've got every customer on credit hold. I review every order from $1 up before it leaves. I've always been conservative, but I wasn't looking at every single account." That, regrettably, is the new face of credit management, in this case the credit manager of a large West Coast materials supply d . . . keep reading
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This month's topic: Biggest Problems Faced In 2010 & The Solutions
Click here to participate!
We're examining:
- The top problems credit execs are facing right now
- The steps being taken to solve problems
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February 2010
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